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Creating a 'choose your own adventure' live play with Typeform surveys

  • 30 January 2021
  • 7 replies
  • 882 views
J
Userlevel 1

Background: I want to create a 'Choose your own adventure' survey application to go alongside a live play. The idea is that users will answer a survey about how they want the show to go, and the results will be shown to the actors. This will happen a few separate times throughout the play, the audience will be asked questions and their answers will inform the way the show progresses.

Question: Can I create something like this in Typeform? If so, how? I am open to crazy ideas. I am considering making a custom website to do this, so that could factor into the solution as well. Here are a few of my ideas, in order of my preference:

  1. Single form. Audience members would answer a few questions, and reach a stopping point (could be soft). Their responses would be seen by the director. At the next decision point, the audience would move on, either by being prompted by the survey or instructed by the actors. The questions they see next are based off of the group's previous answers. This cycle continues
  2. Multiple forms. Audience members would answer a few questions, and would submit the survey, sending the results to the director. They would then be redirected to different survey (based off of the group's answers). This would continue a few more times
  3. Multiple forms + website. Audience members would answer a few questions, and would submit the survey, sending the results to the director. They would then be redirected to a website, which would display a link to the next survey (based off of the group's responses)

Assumptions: 

  1. All questions and associated logic will be pre-deterimined
  2. All answers are multiple choice (hidden variables??)
  3. The next set of questions that audience answers will be based off of the groups' previous answers
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Best answer by Liz 30 January 2021, 19:33

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7 replies

john.desborough
Userlevel 7
Badge +6

@jacob6838 - from a user perspective: great idea (sort of like the ‘make your choice novels of years gone by)!!! 

I think this can be done easily in Typeform (humble user perception) - one of the new ‘features’ that is discussed elsewhere, and which one of the Typeform team will be able to point out faster than i can find it, is that the responses to a form are stored in the browser for 15 days - ie you get 60 percent of the way through a 200 question survey and have to leave it - as long as you reload the typeform from the same link, without having cleared your cache and not using incognito/private modes, you should have the values in the form and can pick up where you left off. 

this seems to me that it would work at the theatre ie fill out first question group before the start of act 1 scene 1, then when prompted to go to next set of questions (q-group 2) fill out the set of questions and stop at the group summary page waiting for the next prompt to go to q-group 3… seems like a simple way to do that. if someone shuts off their phone/device instead of muting it .. they should be able to recover and be inline with the play and the typeform. 

alternately - there might be a way at the end of first set of q’s, submit them and put a link on the exit page that passes the responses as hidden values into the next form ie for scene 2, load them into the new typeform variables and leverage the logic flow to enable which question they head towards …. 

at least that is what i would think and the 7 other voices in my head agree.. if this is rambling, it is because of the late night double espresso i should have had AFTER looking at the forum.. 

better ideas are forthcoming from the Typeform Team i am sure.. 

 

cheers

If your third coffee of the day is not helping you with your Typeform, maybe we can help you find your answers...
Liz
Rank
Userlevel 7
Badge +5

Hi @jacob6838 ! Thanks for stopping by the community. 

This is SO cool. What’s the adventure your respondents are going on? Can I come with? :joy:

@john.desborough is right that we do have a new feature that stores responses for up to 15 days, but this stores them in the browser, meaning that you wouldn’t be able to see those answers until the respondent hits the submit button. This may or may not matter, depending on what your ideal outcome is for collecting answers. 

There are a few ways you could go about it, but I think the easiest one would be this setup here. (It’s for our classic builder, but the setup is essentially the same for the new builder.) It would require you to create a few forms, but basically, the setup would look like this: 

  1. Determine how many stopping points you’d like in the form. 
  2. Then, create a new form for each of those stopping points. For example, if the respondent will stop three times in the form, create 2-3 forms. 
  3. Next, add the questions for each of the forms. 
  4. Finally, follow this process for passing data from one form to the next. 

I’m also pinging @James here since he works on inspirational articles and @picsoung who may have another fancier workaround that I’m missing. 

Finally, have you ever seen our adventure form? The developers/creatives made this once to test the format, which I thought was super cool. Reminds me of what you’re trying to create. :) 

We also have an interactive choose-your-own-adventure story template here as well. 

Life is a series of awkward moments separated by snacks.
J
Userlevel 1

Hi @Liz,

Thanks for your reply!

Truthfully I don’t know a ton about the play, my friend is the one with the creativity. I’ll reach out to him and get you some more information on that soon!

I think your described solution gets me 90% of the way to a working solution. I am attempting to build a solution that would work live, for an audience of ~40 or so people. The logic that decides which form a person sees next is not based off of that individual person’s responses, but the responses of the entire group. If an audience member chooses option A, but the group as a whole votes for option B, then the next set of questions/survey they receive should be for option B. Is there a way that I can access the full compiled results of a previous survey/quiz in the next survey?

I am also considering integrating a custom website which could redirect people to the correct survey, after it receives the survey results from Typeform. At the end of a survey they would be directed to the website, and when the time came to answer the next set of questions the website would automatically show them the next survey link.

My ideal would be to implement this completely within Typeform, but I am open to other options as well

J
Userlevel 1

After re-reading the link @Liz sent me, if the hidden information for the next survey is encoded in the url that the user is redirected to, would it be possible to encode a link to the previous survey’s response summary in that redirect link, and parse those results in the next form to determine the next set of questions to display? 

Trying to think out of the box, maybe a little too much though haha

john.desborough
Userlevel 7
Badge +6

@jacob6838  - i think you can pass responses as hidden fields but that might make for one heck of a big url text line.. 

maybe if you pass all the responses into, say a Google sheet, and use the back end to do the calculation on the whole audience participation to drive which of the next possible questions sets will be the target and then use an add-in like Document Studio to generate a email back to the users with the link to the next group-chosen typeform…can include a pdf of their responses back to them as a report about their questions/answers. a thought. 

there are a couple of other threads here that talk about calling the API and doing some work at the backend and passing it back to the user’s browser that might work ( @Liz @Nordin ??) - i have yet to crack the API open yet and dig into this type of solution

 

If your third coffee of the day is not helping you with your Typeform, maybe we can help you find your answers...
Liz
Rank
Userlevel 7
Badge +5

Hi @jacob6838 You would need to setup logic jumps on the very first set of questions to determine which questions to show based on the answers provided in the hidden fields. If there aren’t too many questions/answers on each form, the URL shouldn’t be too long. This would be the easiest setup. 

@john.desborough also has a great idea of passing the data to Google Sheets, and if you’re comfortable with front-end development, @Nordin may have a handy solution for you to pass the data from Google Sheets into the form. (I’m not 100% on that, but he’ll know for sure!)

Life is a series of awkward moments separated by snacks.
James
Rank
Userlevel 7
Badge +5

Hey @jacob6838 this is an amazing idea! Did you manage to figure out an approach yet? Would love to know if you manage to pull it off, as content writer at Typeform I am always on the look out for interesting use cases to feature to inspire other intrepid creators like yourself :cowboy:  

If you're still stuck on it let us know where you got up to and maybe we can get some eyes on it :eyes:

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